Eresby, of 1395, in which there is a bequest of a saddle: "I will that the Master of the said Chantry, being the parish priest of Spillesby, shall have my best horse and best saddle for a mortuary." Thus there appears to have been a custom to give saddles as well as suits of armour and swords as mortuaries.
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Fig. 965. Bit
Gilt bronze, enriched with champlevé enamel. Middle of the XIVth century Metropolitan Museum, New York
If we look at some of the royal seals, notably the second great seal of Henry III and the seal of Edward I, we see that the war saddle has altered but little; it is cantled high both back and front. Knights rode with the leg straight, necessitating the padding of the saddle seat to an exaggerated degree, as can be seen in the case of the Milan statue of Bernabo Visconti (Fig. 964).
Many evidences are extant of the sumptuous military horse furniture of the XIVth and XVth centuries. In the Musée de Cluny is a strong curb bit, with a bar of unusual length and square bosses on either side elaborately enamelled with heraldic bearings, which appears to date from the middle of the XIVth century. Two others of the same type, made of bronze gilt, are known to the present writer, one in the Royal Armoury of Turin (D 58 in the catalogue of that collection) bearing the arms of the Sicilian family of Bracciforti di Botero, the other, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, furnished with an enamelled square-shaped boss (one is lost). The arms that appear upon this specimen (Fig. 965) have not been recognized.
The Riggs Collection, now in the Metropolitan Museum of New York, contains a bit of the closing years of the XIVth century, which consists in a most complicated Moorish bar fashioned on the lines of what is known as the "Hanoverian porte" and rendered formidably powerful by the addition of a set of nine rollers. Made of gilded iron, with short,
